Introduction

1 INTRODUCTION David Duff and Marc Porée Of the émigrés returning to France after the fall of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbons, Talleyrand, the Prince of Diplomats, notoriously quipped: “Ils n’ont rien appris, ni rien oublié” (They have learnt nothing, and forgotten nothing). 1 Characteristic and accurate as it may have been, that (in)famous contemporary response falls far short of the complex truths of displacement, of which emigration, exile and expatriation are crucially emblematic components. Crucial but highly differentiated: whereas the émigré has tended to be viewed as a coward or a traitor to his or her nation, bitterly vilified as such, at least in the French Republican historiography, the exile has frequently been invested with a heroic status, and construed as outshining other foreigners in view of the moral and symbolic superiority ascribed to him or her, rightly or wrongly. As for expatriates, they have tended to occupy a grey zone, a no man’s land of definitions, as befits their condition of residence, provisional or permanent, in a country that is not their own. Originating in papers read at an international symposium held in Paris in 2018 on the topic “Exiles, Émigrés and Expatriates in Romantic-Era Paris and London,” 2 this special issue has as one of its primary objectives to clarify the semantics of such a triad. The fact that two of the terms enter the English language in this era, during the French revolutionary emigration and its aftermath, suggests at once the importance of this historical experience in 1 For the origins of this (partially apocryphal) statement, see Friedemann Pestel, Kosmopoliten wider Willen: Die “monarchiens” als Revolutionsemigranten (Berlin: Oldenbourg – De Gruyter, 2015) 512-13. 2 The Paris Symposium of the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar, held at the École Normale Supérieure (rue d’Ulm), on 12-13 April 2018. David Duff and Marc Porée 2 shaping our modern understanding of these concepts and the vocabulary with which we articulate them. According to the OED, 3 the French word émigré (sometimes altered to emigré) enters English in 1792, the year of the first major influx of refugees from revolutionary France. The existing English noun emigrant (dating from 1754), also acquires new currency and a specifically French resonance in the 1790s, while the adjectival form emigrant is first used in 1796. The noun immigrant is first recorded in 1787 but is rarely used in this context, suggesting that removal (often forcible) from home was a stronger determinant of identity than adoption by a foreign host. 4 Expatriate as a verb meaning “to withdraw from one’s native country,” and, in a legal sense, “to renounce one’s citizenship or allegiance,” dates from 1787; the noun follows in 1818, but the assumption of voluntariness that it carries today (crystallised in the colloquial form “expat,” a 1960s coinage) is a later development, since in 1817 “to expatriate” also meant “to drive a person from his or her native country; to banish.” This takes it close in meaning to the much older term exile, which dates back to the fourteenth century and has been widely used as verb, noun and adjective ever since, to cover both compulsory and voluntary forms of banishment (the latter, often via the reflexive phrase, “to exile oneself”). Again, the word develops new visibility in our period, as does refugee, applied frequently to the French revolutionary exiles, though derived historically from an earlier influx of French people, the Huguenots who fled to Britain in seventeenth century after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Another word in this vocabulary of displacement is alien, the preferred legal term for a foreign national, given fresh currency by the Aliens Act of January 1793, which introduced a new system of registration and tight controls on the movement of foreign visitors. 5 The “Alien 3 Oxford English Dictionary Online, at www.oed.com. The history of corresponding French terminology can be explored on the database of the Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales, at https://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/. See also the discrimination of (English) terms attempted by Juliette Reboul, French Emigration to Great Britain in Response to French Revolution (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) 1-29 (“Émigrés, Refugees and Emigrants”). 4 Though not concerned with the history of terminology, Wiley makes the important claim, confirmed by the present volume, that it was at the end of the eighteenth century that “the concept of migration acquired the complex semantic and ideological range familiar to the twenty-first century.” Michael Wiley, Romantic Migrations: Local, National, and Transnational Dispositions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) x. 5 For the impact of this legislation, see Kirsty Carpenter, Refugees of the French Revolution: Émigrés in London, 1789-1802 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999) 35-39. Introduction 3 Office” was created at the same time, as a sub-department of the Home Office: 6 one of its actions was to expel Talleyrand in March 1794 with five days’ notice. The juxtaposition of Paris and London as points of focus for this lexical and historical inquiry reveals both symmetries and contrasts. As the “capital of the Emigration,” 7 London and its surrounding areas attracted a larger proportion of the estimated 130,000 to 150,000 émigrés from revolutionary France than any other European city; 8 numbers for Britain as a whole may have been 20-25,000 at their peak in 1792, with London and its environs accounting for the large majority of these. Equivalent numbers for British émigrés in Paris at this time were much smaller but they were nonetheless significant, and the activities of the British emigrant community have been well documented, not least by the spies who were sent to France to monitor them (though their record is hardly a reliable one). 9 Foreign nationals in the two cities – which of course included nationalities other than British and French – faced rapidly changing conditions which dramatically affected the emigrant experience, sometimes in parallel ways. The same year, for example, in which French émigrés in Britain became subject to the provisions of the Aliens Act, British expatriates in France felt the effects of the Law of Suspects of 17 September, allowing arrest of anyone suspected of counter-revolutionary sympathies or insufficient commitment to the Revolution, and stipulating the internment of all foreign nationals (Helen Maria Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, Sampson Perry and others discussed in this volume were just some of the estimated 250 British expatriates – along with other nationalities – imprisoned under this Act). 6 Elizabeth Sparrow, “The Alien Office,” Historical Journal, 33 (1990): 361-84. 7 Kirsty Carpenter, “London: Capital of the Emigration,” The French Émigrés in Europe and the Struggle against Revolution, 1789-1814, ed. Kirsty Carpenter and Philip Mansel (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 43-67. See also Kirsty Carpenter, “London: Emigration in Politics and Imaginations,” The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution, ed. David Andress (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) 330-45. 8 Donald Greer, The Incidence of Emigration during the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951) 19-20; figures for Britain are taken from Carpenter, Refugees of the French Revolution 39-44, who stresses the difficulty of making accurate estimates because of year-by-year fluctuations. Carpenter proposes an annual average of 12,500 for 1789-1802. 9 See John G. Alger, “The British Colony in Paris, 1792-1793,” English Historical Review, 13.52 (1898): 672-94; Rachel Rogers, Vectors of Revolution: The British Radical Community in Early Republican Paris, 1792-1794 (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Université Toulouse le Mirail – Toulouse II, 2013). For a broader historical overview, see Robin Eagles, Francophilia in English Society, 1748-1815 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) 94-119 (“The British Expatriate Community in France 1748-1815”). David Duff and Marc Porée 4 In both locations, too, migration patterns were directly linked to political and military events: the rate of emigration from France to Britain was determined by successive pieces of government legislation which proscribed different categories of clergy, nobles and dissidents one by one and then deprived them of their citizenship and forbid their return on pain of execution. British arrivals in Paris, likewise, followed the turns and counter-turns of the French political situation, as the “blissful dawn” of 1789-92 which attracted so many radical sympathisers (William Wordsworth among them) gave way to a more volatile situation which led Britons many to come home – though French regulations often impeded this and the outbreak of war in February 1793 made cross-Channel travel of any kind extremely dangerous. Domestic politics, though, was another factor, and some Britons came to Paris less to sympathise with the French Revolution than to escape the increasingly ferocious persecution of radicalism at home. The year of peace ushered in by the Treaty of Amiens in March 1802 provided a brief opportunity for émigrés on both sides to return home (Napoleon having revoked the decrees which made this punishable by death for French exiles), but the renewal of hostilities in May 1803 left many trapped, among them Frances Burney, another British writer discussed briefly in this volume. When the war finally came to end with the Battle of Waterloo, a new process of repatriation began, notably of released prisoners of war, whose numbers across Europe, estimated at 130,000, matched those of the émigrés, though this category of exile is often overlooked. The post-war world also brought new opportunities for migration and travel, and London and Paris resumed their former status as sites of international tourism and of cosmopolitan sociability for the educated and wealthy. The case studies that follow give many examples of individual destinies shaped by the movements of history and the fluctuations of public opinion. The semantics of our triad of terms are thus never fixed or rigid: they shift, blend or morph, to become something else or to accommodate other types, as is illustrated by Gustav von Schlabrendorf, discussed by Philipp Hunnekuhl. Technically Schlabrendorf was an expatriate in Paris – he had come voluntarily, and settled – but he felt and behaved more as an exile, threatened by his Silesian relatives and the Prussian government with confiscation of his estates if he did not cease his philanthropic activities (an over-zealous display of revolutionary fraternité, in their opinion) and return home. He experienced, too, a form of exile in his adoptive home, undergoing imprisonment during the Terror for his association with the Girondin faction and narrowly escaping the guillotine, then later becoming a dangerously vocal critic of Napoleon. His Napoleon Bonaparte und das französische Volk unter seinem Consulate (Napoleon Bonaparte and the French People under his Consulate), published anonymously in Hamburg in Introduction 5 1804, risked proscription in France but secured his reputation as an international man of letters and impartial observer of world-historical events. Meeting him in Paris in 1817, Henry Crabb Robinson, another cosmopolitan, observed some of these transformations and saw a unity in his diversity, describing him in his diary as an embodiment of the Kantian principles of disinterestedness and synthesis (ironically, because of the double anonymity, they were both unaware that Robinson has translated Schlabrendorf’s 1806 sequel to his book). A more extreme case, as Christoph Bode demonstrates, is the German ethnologist, travel writer and revolutionary Georg Forster, who travelled to Paris in 1793 to ask for the admittance of the short-lived Republic of Mainz to the French Republic, only to die there under miserable circumstances a few months later, not yet 40. The multiple careers and identities of this polyglot polymath – who used three versions of his first name, in German, English, and French – make his response to expatriation a paradigm of the semantic mobility this volume explores. Bode’s essay asks the kinds of questions all biographers of cases like Forster’s must address: how did he end up in revolutionary Paris? What made him go to France at a time when so many were fleeing in the opposite direction? What made him simultaneously an expatriate, an exile, and an immigrant, seeking the assimilation not only of himself but of own country into the French Republic? Forster is presented by Bode as “an intellectual with no affiliations or loyalties to any linguistic, ethnic or national community – a citizen of the world, obliged only to live a life in which he proves to be ‘worthy of himself.’” Yet this intensely personal crusade also involved equally intense sociability, the record of his encounters in Paris revealing the extraordinary internationalism and connectedness of the expatriate community, in which he could meet Mary Wollstonecraft, H.M. Williams, Thomas Christie, Thomas Paine, Gustav von Schlabrendorf, Bernadin de St Pierre and numerous others in a matter of days or weeks. A similar impression is given by Edward Weech’s case study of Thomas Manning, friend of Charles Lamb, who came to Paris in 1802 for intellectual and cultural rather than political reasons – to pursue his interest in mathematics and deepen his knowledge of the Chinese language and culture in what was then the centre of European Sinology. Although he arrived in Paris nine years after Forster and was motivated by other concerns, his contacts list strikingly overlaps with those of Forster (including Paine, of whom they offer contrasting portraits, and Helen Maria Williams, still the leading British salonnière), but also includes returned French émigrés such as François-René de Chateaubriand, who was then immersed in finishing his Génie du christianisme. Despite his largely apolitical temperament (his curiosity to see Napoleon was the one exception, and, remarkably, David Duff and Marc Porée 6 he was later to interview Napoleon on St Helena), Manning fell victim in 1803, like many other expatriates, to the French internment policy, spending a year in captivity in the town of Angers before eventually being allowed to return to England. What began, then, as essentially an intellectual research trip became a complex and at times difficult experience in which Manning felt the shifting challenge of expatriate life and the inseparability of politics, culture and personal destiny at this historical moment. If these examples illustrate some of the different modalities of exile and emigration, the case of Mary Wollstonecraft shows how categorisation by gender can also prove effective and fruitful. Emma Clery’s essay on Wollstonecraft’s prolonged stay in Paris lays emphasis on the feminist trope equating the condition of women with a state of exile. Women have no country which they can call their own, Virginia Woolf would famously claim, in an essay which draws on, without directly referencing, Woolf’s reading of Wollstonecraft’s unfinished novel The Wrongs of Women; or, Maria (1798). The same trope of womanhood as exile surfaces in other 1790s women’s writing, notably Charlotte Smith’s poem The Emigrants (1793) and novel The Banished Man (1794), which was originally entitled “The Exile.” Awareness of this feminist inflection to the theme of expatriation enables Clery to reappraise vexed issues in Wollstonecraft’s biography, namely her motives for travelling to Paris in December 1792, for deciding to stay at the outbreak of war in February 1793, and for being so reluctant to leave in early 1795, despite having witnessed the excesses of the Terror and the execution of many of her Girondin friends. In her case, literal and metaphorical meanings of exile converge – whatever degree of voluntariness we ascribe to her decisions – and a fuller understanding of her experiences and their literary expression can provide a new way of thinking about the relationship between gender and exile. A broader context for Wollstonecraft, Williams, Paine and other British expatriates in Paris is provided by the essay that opens this volume, Rachel Rogers’s wide-ranging study of the expatriate community centred at White’s Hotel in 1792-93, and of the “associational culture” forged first by radical gatherings there and then by the collective persecution and incarceration that followed with the Law of Suspects and the onset of the Terror. Rogers stresses the internal diversity of the so-called “British Club,” sharp awareness of the separate national identities of English, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh members (each country with its distinctive radical traditions) coexisting with a commitment to universalism and Anglo-French solidarity. This fact alone puts in question any simplistic link between expatriation and bland cosmopolitanism: expatriate life encourages the performance of national differences as well as rites of assimilation. Introduction 7 Rogers emphasises, too, the diversity of motives that drew British radicals to Paris and detained them there, showing how political activism often intertwined with entrepreneurial initiatives as British residents expediently exploited the opportunities which opened up under revolutionary government – by acquiring property available at low prices after the flight of émigrés, for instance, or by engaging in political journalism to feed local and international demand for authoritative news and comment. Through a series of examples ranging from Thomas Paine to the poet and dramatist Robert Merry and the radical journalist Sampson Perry – who had the rare distinction of being imprisoned in both London and Paris – Rogers highlights once again the shifting modalities of émigré identity. In a final section, she also pinpoints a recurrent literary effect of this distinctive pattern of experience: the choice of unfinished, rough forms (often denoted by the term “sketch”), whether due to the absence of a fullyfledged master narrative on the topic of expatriation, or to the perception that incomplete, off-the-cuff statements or artistic gestures were more mimetic of, and more true to, a condition of fragmentation and dislocation. Her aperçu sheds light on many of the writings covered in this volume. The last four essays turn attention from Paris to London, or occasionally other British locations. Dominic Bellenger studies one of the largest and most visible categories of French émigrés, the exiled clergy, which accounted at times for more than half the emigrant population and included repatriated British clergy from the network of Catholic schools and colleges at Douai, St Omer and elsewhere. Bellenger considers both the shortand long-term effects of this influx, from the perspective of British public opinion as well as that of the exiled clergy themselves. The massive reinforcement of the British Catholic community was in some eyes the best thing that had happened since the Reformation, but the arrival of vast quantities of Roman Catholics into predominantly Protestant Britain could not but cause resentment and stir long-suppressed emotions. Though eliciting widespread public sympathy and receiving extensive charitable support, the emigrant clergy were at times also in danger of becoming an enemy within, threatening the delicate balance between different religious denominations and awakening the fear of indoctrination of British youth. Protective or pre-emptive legal moves such as the Aliens Act had as part of their motivation the monitoring of this ideologically powerful community, though the evidence suggests the emigrant clergy contributed more to the anti-Jacobin crusade than to any other political cause. This is demonstrated by Abbé Barruel’s best-selling Memoirs, Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1797-98), whose conspiracy theories impressed Edmund Burke and later influenced even writers as ideologically opposed to Barruel as Percy and Mary Shelley. David Duff and Marc Porée 8 Friedemann Pestel’s essay takes up directly the question of indoctrination of the young and challenges Talleyrand’s dictum that the émigrés had “learnt nothing” by analysing émigré schooling. Émigré parents, particularly those from privileged backgrounds, faced the challenge of educating their children so as to prepare them both for an adaptive life in Britain, separated from their wealth and privilege, and preparing them to become France’s future elite after the wished-for Restoration. This distinctive ideological agenda shaped the curriculum of émigré schools, of which a large number were created, often with the support of local politicians or dignitaries and with teachers drawn from the émigré clergy or sometimes parents themselves. The best known were the Penn School founded by Edmund Burke and the Abbé Carron’s institutions on Tottenham Court Road and later Somers Town, some of which admitted British children as well as French, fostering social integration. The pedagogic remit and public engagement programs of such schools testify to their pivotal role in émigré community life, and Pestel’s analysis shows how “education helped to strengthen the émigrés’ identity and mobilise their hosts for the ideological, military and humanitarian struggle against the Revolution.” No less ideologically loaded were children’s émigré novels, a fashionable subgenre inaugurated by Stéphanie de Genlis’s Les petits émigrés (1798), which embodied the same set of expectations in fictional form, taking education as a central theme. The penultimate essay, by Richard Tholoniat, considers the exilic experience of prisoners of war, focussing on the case of René-Martin Pillet, who was taken prisoner at the Battle of Vimeiro in 1808 and spent the rest of the war in British jails, including the infamous prison hulks on the Medway estuary. Pillet’s account of his experiences, L’Angleterre vue à Londres et dans ses provinces pendant un séjour de dix années, dont six comme prisonnier de guerre (1815), is usually read as a work of rabid Anglophobia, designed to fuel French resentment after the defeat of Napoleon, but Tholoniat offers a more subtle reading which highlights the insights as well as the distortions and exaggerations of Pillet’s book, and his genuine appreciation of certain features of British political, cultural and economic life, despite the adverse conditions of his six-year stay (he has also spent time in England as a free man before his captivity). Though emphatically a piece of exile literature, of the special kind that depicts foreign imprisonment, and a work of anti-English propaganda (immediately banned by the British authorities who occupied Paris for three years after the Battle of Waterloo), Pillet’s book is also émigré writing, with the observational energy and contrastive techniques which mark other examples of the genre. Here, once again, the semantics of our triad merge and morph. Introduction 9 The volume concludes with an essay by Paul Hamilton on a theme which lurks beneath many of the contributions to this inquiry: “the uses of exile.” According to Hamilton in his comparative treatment of Ugo Foscolo and Thomas Moore, exile, painful and deplorable as it often is, can be put to use, in the same way that ghastly and cruel fairy-tales are put to use by their (teenage) readers, as argued by Bruno Bettelheim in his famous book on The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1976). Hamilton’s contention, roughly stated, is that émigrés and exiles came to share and exchange their respective grievances, leading to a redefinition of sympathies and allegiances. Someone’s patriotic feelings came to be viewed, if not as everyone’s patriotic ties, at least as “a natural recourse for other nationalities,” whether stranded in London, Paris or Berlin. From a European perspective, exile, emigration and expatriation thus come to be seen as part and parcel of the activity of doing politics in the context of the nineteenth century, “the century of exiles,” as postulated by Sylvie Aprile, 10 but also the century of revolutions, leading to the emergence of a new figure, a “personnage conceptuel,” 11 that of the political refugee. It may also be part and parcel of Romanticism, Foscolo’s novel Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis) (1802/1816) being both a fictional reflection of the author’s experience of political alienation and ultimately exile, and a recasting, for a contemporary readership caught up in the political turbulence of the early nineteenth century, of the sentimental mode of Rousseau’s Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) and Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774). 12 Though radically different in genre and style, Moore’s Irish Melodies (1808-34) presents an analogous case, both works being designed, as Hamilton argues, “to let usefully powerful allies appropriate such writings to voice, as their own nationalist sentiments, causes originally Irish and Italian.” For all the difficulties and dangers, then, this volume advances the idea that leaving one’s country can be construed as an opportunity. Not in any easily cynical kind of way, but simply because, in actual fact, pace Talleyrand, 10 Sylvie Aprile, Le siècle des exilés. Bannis et proscrits de 1789 à la Commune (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2010); Sylvie Aprile and Delphine Diaz, “Europe and Its Political Refugees in the 19th Century,” trans. Kate Macnaughton, Books and Ideas, 18 April 2016, http://www. booksandideas.net/Europe-and-its-Political-Refugees-in-the-19th-Century.html. 11 Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Qu’est-ce que la Philosophie? (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1991) 64. 12 For other suggestive explorations of the relationship between Romanticism and exile, see Stephen Cheeke, Byron and Place: History, Translation, Nostalgia (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); and Jane Stabler, The Artistry of Exile: Romantic and Victorian Writers in Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).